Excerpt from the novel Safe As Milk

First published in The Santa Monica Review

Something Like That

    Mary says I want things to be simple, I wonder when things got so convoluted and weird. Everything has evolved and I no longer feel any kind of freedom. Alice sits behind Mary on her knees on the Silver Queen Motel bed, braiding her black hair. Everything in the room has "Silver Queen" sewn on it in blue cursive-stitched writing. Mary says she's getting sick of Claremore, she's sick of Silver Queens. Mary hardly ever mentions Franny Cowboy out loud anymore but sometimes when Teddy's not around Alice sees her unconsciously rubbing her side, twisting the skin between her fingers like dough.
    When I want to feel something, Alice thinks, I stick my head upside down underneath the bathtub faucet turned on full force. I inhale through my nose as deep as I can. I let all the feelings flood into my brain through my nose. I remember being small, dunked in the dirty lake by Grampy in an innertube, I remember sweaty days in the aqua-painted pool, feeling scared in the middle of the five-foot section, I remember my first shower. I breathe water when I want to feel, when I need to remember something, where I'm going.
    "Yeah," is what Alice says, out loud.
    Mary drinks straight from a bottle of $1.69 wine and laughs at commercials on TV. They are still staying in the motel, thanks to Teddy. Teddy pays for everything even though he could walk home – seven blocks away – if he wanted. Instead he stays and pays.
    Teddy spends a lot of time quoting and thinking about Rimbaud. He says he wants to live life at a Nietzschean-level of no regret. Teddy says feminism is simply a reaction to Greenberg-defined Modernism and is therefore null and void. Alice thinks it's boring the way Teddy talks so much. He takes over conversations that don't even exist. He never asks a question. At night Alice overhears him saying I don't even know what love is, maybe someday I'll find love, out of all the millions of words that exist in language – why love? When Teddy's not around, Mary is his biggest debaser.
    "Do you know what Teddy said to me," she says to Alice. "He says his father bears an eerie resemblance to Verlaine. Insinuating," she bursts into giggles, "that he is the poet incarnate!" When Teddy is around, Mary is spacey and indifferently submissive, listening wide-eyed to his theories, smiling and shrugging. Alice imagines secretly confessing to Teddy about how Mary makes fun of him when he's away but she knows she never will.
    Teddy took them to the J.M. Davis Gun Museum and bragged about his knowledge of firearms. Alice stared at a painting of John Monroe Davis posed in front of a brown wall-full of guns and cattle horns, one arm on his hip, one casually resting on the counter in front of him, smug downturning of mouth, shiny globing of forehead, long ears, small eyes. Alice wondered what he'd done to look so satisfied.
    Teddy showed them the collection of outlaw guns. He pointed out Pancho Villa's with a snort. He explained to them about the Kolibri, the smallest commercially manufactured automatic pistol in the world.
    "This is a ladies' gun," he said. "It weighs only two and a half ounces."
    "How much does a man's gun weigh?" Alice had asked.
    "My personal choice," Teddy had said, "is the Colt Walker pistol, four pounds, nine ounces with a nine-inch barrel."
     "Ah," Alice had said.
    "Oh really?" Mary had said. "What kind of gun do you have?"
    "Smith and Wesson," Teddy mumbled but then looked up hopefully, "snub-nose revolver, a thirty-eight."
    The next night Teddy brought his gun to the motel, showing it off, cleaning it and posing with it in front of the mirror, bragging about how he'd shot a squirrel on the way over. He griped about Ryan taking the car and disappearing, Mary and Alice just shrugged. "That car is just as much yours," Teddy said. "Ryan can't just run off with it. She can't monopolize the thing." Teddy would look pleadingly at Mary, staring cloudy-eyed into space, and then sigh loudly. When they woke up this morning he was gone. Alice hoped he had left for good but Mary told her he had just gone home for breakfast. He'd be back for sure because he'd left behind his gun. When Alice tried to tell Mary about her dreams, Mary just sighed and said, "What's on TV?"
    Late that night, Alice and Mary lay in bed together watching blonde-wig-wearing actresses give blow jobs to hairy inbred-looking men who all moan "Oh yeaah" when they come in the actress' face, little white squirt. Mary smokes cigarette after cigarette and chews on her thumbnails until Teddy calls and says he's on his way over. Mary looks relieved then pissed.
    "I'm bogged down by acquaintances," she says, "Too many connections to fucking maintain."
    "I can't believe you idiots are still here," a voice says through the open window and Ryan climbs inside. "Hello Shitty," she says. She's wearing red corduroy pants and a tight-fitting little boy's button down shirt which makes her look so skinny, like an eleven year old, and Alice thinks she can count every rib through her clothes.
    "You cut your hair," Alice says.
    "Brilliant," Ryan says. Her hair is short, uneven and greasy, black tendrils curling into her eyes and out from behind her earlobes. Alice thinks Ryan's haircut makes her look like a teen-age Mick Jagger: shaggy hair, just-woke-up sleepy eyes, big smirk.
    "So let's hit it," Ryan says. "I've got to get back to Oklahoma City."
    "We're waiting for Teddy," Alice says.
    "Oh no you're not," Ryan says.
    "It's nice to have somebody to fuck," Mary says.
    "Fuck me, Franseen," Ryan says. "We're leaving." She grabs Alice's jacket and throws it at her. "Look what I found," Ryan says. She pulls out a long hand-held tool and shakes it in the air like a sword. Alice thinks it looks like one of those stiffened leashes that clowns carry around with them pretending to walk an invisible dog. Ryan points it at Alice. "Metal detector," she whispers loudly. "I'm going to find Pretty Boy's tommy gun or at least the bullet that killed him."
    "Where did you get that?" Mary asks. Ryan raises her eyebrow and pouts, shrugs, winks. "Look what I've got," Mary laughs. She throws Teddy's gun on the bed then scampers into the bathroom to get her toothbrush. Ryan grabs the gun, sticks it in her waistband and kisses Alice on the mouth. Nice the way you came to meet me in OKC, she says.
    "I saw Mr. Dean," Alice says. Ryan's eyes widen then narrow. "He gave me a ride after you ditched me at the grain elevator."
    "You're stupid," Ryan says.
    "I saw him. He gave me a ride. He has a new car now."
    "No he doesn't."
    "He gave me a ride, he asked to be my friend. He beat off while I was asleep."
    Ryan stands, eyes buzzing, jaw clenched.
    "I swear," Alice says.
    Mary comes out of the bathroom and says, "All set." Ryan glowers at Alice and then goes out and gets into the car.
    On the highway out of town Mary points at a sign directing travelers to Oklahoma City and Ryan drives straight by.
    "You missed the exit," Mary says.
    "Tell me about it," Ryan says and steps on the gas.

*

    There are lots of churches in the Cookson Hills. Long, low, brown-brick churches with gameshow placards out front. Come On Down and Find Jesus. Win Big With God. Alice thinks it's because the people out here have just as much chance of finding Paradise as they do of winning that car or dream vacation and they know it.
    "Pretty Boy and Richetti always came here when they needed to escape the heat," Ryan had said, driving them toward places too small to be named on the gas station map.
    "I want to die out here," Ryan says. "I want to fly this fucking car off the highway and die right here listening to the song from that old James Bond movie." Ryan rolls her head around on her neck and closes her eyes. She makes the sound of squealing brakes in her throat and runs her hands lightly over the steering wheel like it's out of control. "Yeah," she says, "just like in the movies."
    "Except it wouldn't be like the movies," Alice says. "No one would hear the music playing when you died but you. You'd have the soundtrack but no one would ever hear it. No one would even know."
    "Yeah," Mary says, "And I bet it wouldn't even be the cool version of that song playing when you died. It would be Guns 'n' Roses for you, babe." She cackles.
    "Forget it," Ryan says, furiously rolling down her window and spitting outside. "Fuck both of you motherheads." Alice watches the white glob of spit fly straight out of Ryan's mouth only to be whisked away into the wind. She pictures it in slow motion, whirling and rotating over onto itself in its flight backwards, past trees and telephone poles, parallel to the pavement, a rocket ship to Nowheresville, a speeding bullet to the ground.
    "Did you really see Mr. Dean?" Mary asks Alice again, puts her hands over her face. "Fuck me."
    "It's fine. We'll lay low," Ryan says. "Be cool."
    Driving into Akins, Alice notices trailers are the main living quarters in town, the mobile abode of choice. Septic tank companies line each street. Every once in awhile a big luxurious looking ranch breaks up the monotony – three shiny new pickups as opposed to a rusted-out schoolbus up on blocks. Pale orange cows with noses like apricots stand, heads dipped, in fields of lush green longhair grass. The clouds are so white and puffy they look like powdered wigs and Mary can't stop laughing.
    When they stop at a roadside cafe called The Garden of Eatin' Alice feels transported to another planet. Instead of a garden, the cafe looks more like a high school cafeteria, all cracking white light and cold-tiled floors, orange and metal everything, blank, greasy smell. The people all look the same, washed out blue eyes, colorless hair, tired, defeated gaze. A little boy sits yelling Dat Der, Dat Der! Alice feels sick when she realizes it is a prelude to his father's, "That there food is going down that there throat before you leave this here table." Everyone sits with cigarettes in hand, eating and smoking. No one's talking. Everyone stares. It doesn't seem real.
    Alice looks across the table at Ryan, who’s also smoking and looking happier than ever. Her short hair is completely greasy a la Pretty Boy Floyd. She read somewhere that he used to love hair grease so much if he couldn't get any pomade he would use axle grease instead. She took it to heart.
    "It says here he was five-seven and a half just like me," Ryan beams, looking up from the booklet she stole from the Historical Society in Oklahoma City. It is the actual little book that was published in the thirties by a man who followed Pretty Boy's tracks and interviewed his friends and family as well as the FBI men who killed him. Alice thinks it looks rare and wonders how Ryan got away with it. "He had chestnut hair and pin-pupiled eyes," Ryan reads, "Heavy-lidded, full-lipped." She squints and pouts. "We look like Quantrill, too."
    "You look like a geek to me," Mary says.
    "Pretty Boy was the natural successor to Quantrill," Ryan says. "Not by blood, blood doesn't count, by personal connections, criminal heritage. Fucking tradition." She nods and smiles, pushes her hair behind her ears. "Here it is," she says, pointing at Pretty Boy's signature beneath one of his mugshots. "My tattoo." Ryan grins then stands up and saunters off to the bathroom. Pointing her fingers into pistols, she shoots from the hip at a man staring at them from the corner.
    Alice scoots over into Ryan's chair and gazes across the table into Mary's eyes. "She's crazy," Alice says. Mary twists the end of her pigtail into a point and puts it into her mouth, suckling on it and staring into space. She cocks her head to the side as though listening to someone whispering in her ear then takes the wet end of her hair out of her mouth and runs it up and down over her own face and lips. "Why did you give her Teddy's gun?" Alice asks, waving her hand in front of Mary's face.
    "Come here," Mary says to Alice, eyes half closed. Alice looks around then leans slowly forward, face first across the table. "See?" Mary says, running the wet pigtail tip over Alice's cheeks and eyelids. Mary's mouth hangs open slightly, her eyebrows arched like little bridges above her aqua-masked eyes. She runs her pigtail over Alice's lips and chin. Alice stares at her and imagines scratching her face, leaving long red trails down her cheeks, jet's flame across the sky.
    "Out of my eyeballin' seat, Nerd," Ryan says, giving Alice a shove. Alice slides over into her own plastic chair and stares out the smudgey window at a white cat sitting outside in the parking lot, licking its paws by the gas pump. It raises its chin and looks at her, focusing in on her eyes. He looks so smart, Alice thinks, I can see his Little Man. The cat turns away, whiskers twitching, and then disappears into the bushes. He's like me, she thinks, cats realize what they missed.

*

    Alice was nine and Mimi was turning thirty-five. Alice had been living with Gramy and Grampy for over seven years, ever since the divorce. She celebrated her second birthday on Grammy and Grampy’s front porch just before she kissed her mommy good-bye for good. After that Mimi lived in Hawaii on active Naval duty. Every few years she boxed up genuine leis and real grass skirts and sent them to Alice, who waited in snowy Iowa and dreamed of her tropical princess mommy doing the hula and blowing kisses on the sand.
    The day of Mimi's homecoming Grampy pulled around his giant vanilla-colored Chrysler Imperial with its all cream-leather interior and vibrating leather armrests, dashboard compass and plush sheepskins covering every seat. Grampy replaced those sheepskins each spring and Alice would sit on them, all spread out, and look at the little lamb bodies, stretched and flat, no heads. Sometimes she would give them names. I'm sorry Horace, she would say, but Grammy is pretty fat. Grammy brought out the homemade afghans and put on her black coat and they all marched single file on Grampy's perfectly straight shoveled walk out to the car.
    Mimi's flight was supposed to arrive in Des Moines at eleven-thirty a.m. and Grampy had it exactly planned. They would leave the house at nine forty-five. Hit the highway by ten o'clock. Reach the airport parking by a quarter to eleven. Park and get inside to the gate at exactly eleven o'clock. Thirty minutes to spare, wait, pace and smoke. Look at the airplanes.
    Grampy enlisted in the Air Force at the age of seventeen. He flew in over Normandy in World War II. He loved to plan. Days like Mimi's homecoming he was in his element. He barked out Rise and Shine at the crack of dawn, Hup Hup, Get the Lead Out. He smoked Vantage after Vantage, looking puffed up, red and smug, never smiling. Grammy would fuss and allow herself to be bossed, benevolent always. She'd been up since seven fixing Grampy's coffee, poached egg and burnt toast and Alice's silver dollar pancakes and baby sausages. Making her own orange juice. The day was bright and Alice squinted at the sun reflecting lightning off the snow.
    Grampy glided the car onto the street and headed out at twenty miles per hour through the town, to the highway. The old highway used to be all there was to the town, bisecting across it, a live wire in a cage. Now it was lined with a Hickory Haus, Hy Vee and a Hardee's where everybody ate before they left on their way out of town. Alice stared at all the restaurants and cars, colors gray-ish and dulled by Grampy's slightly tinted windows. She recognized a girl from school and waved at her purplish face, purplish car, purplish mother.
    Just as Grampy pulled onto the highway and drove over the iron-grating speed bumps making Alice giggle at their fart-noise and Grammy scold Alice! a shiny yellow convertible screeched onto the road behind them. Grammy and Grampy didn't notice at first. They stared ahead, Grammy out the window, Grampy at the road. But Alice pressed her face against the glass, fingers fogging up little mushroom clouds around their tips. The convertible had its top down even in the freeze. It darted back and forth behind them, a bright yellow squirt, frosting lick. The lady driving the car had blonde hair and a hat. She pulled over into the lane next to them, accelerating up alongside. Alice screamed It's Mimi!
    "Well, my land," Grammy said.
    "What the hell!" Grampy yelled.
    "Grampy," Grammy said, "it's just Mimi."
    Grampy stamped on the gas and the Chrysler shot ahead of the convertible. Grammy gasped Grampy! again and Alice laughed in surprise. In the convertible it looked like Mimi was laughing too. She pulled her car up easily alongside the Chrysler again. Alice laughed harder and pounded on the back of Grampy's headrest, bouncing his soft head against it.
    "Come on!" Alice yelled, tapping her fingers on the back of his head. Grampy had the softest silver hair, soft little curls that he would sometimes let Alice comb, but now she tapped at them impatiently. Grampy pressed evenly on the gas. The Chrysler let out a low growl and pulled ahead once again. Then Mimi was ahead, then Grampy, then Mimi. Alice stopped laughing. Grammy was positively see-through. Grampy was bright red. In her car, Mimi looked grim.
    Grampy stared straight ahead through the windshield, pushing the Chrysler further and further along the highway like even though Mimi was on the road next to him, whether she liked it or not, he was going to Des Moines to pick her up from the airport just like he'd planned. Grampy's face got redder and redder. His knuckles were white clenched around the steering wheel. The Chrysler roared in agony. In the backseat, Alice stared at her mother and willed her to stop, smile and let off. Let him win, Alice telepathied her mother. He has to win. Alice watched the back of Grampy’s neck go purple and dreamed she had the power to send her mother up like a puff of smoke, a thin wisp that would be pulled up and out of that convertible and stretched out to nothing by the wind. Grampy would turn back to a normal color and say Atta girl! and Grammy would pat her cheek and say that she was her China doll. The yellow car would coast off the road into the ditch and Grampy would hook it up to the Chrysler to tow home and save for her until she was old enough to drive.
    Face slack, Mimi let Grampy pull ahead for good and then followed him home, a kicked dog, but she tried to save face by chatting gaily and laughing about the whole thing. Alice recognized her laugh. It sounded like singing, it sounded like bubbles going out to sea. Grampy chuckled too, the victor now. It was the best for everybody. Mimi told them about her Hawaiian love and she told Alice how she was going to have a baby sister as she rubbed her belly. She told them how she had bought the convertible with her Navy bonus and how her Hawaiian love was going to move over to the mainland and they were going to have a real baby of their own and live happily ever after. Grammy asked What about this one? She said You know you can’t carry a baby. Grampy said You're not marrying some naked island native. Mimi just kept laughing.
    The yellow convertible broke down the next winter and never got fixed. It got rusty though and its wheels got stolen. The bright yellow paint faded until it almost matched the curdled tint of Grampy's Chrysler. Alice's sister never showed up and Mimi's laugh sounded less and less like singing, more like gravel in a pipe, harsh and fake, a movie gag, a sound effect. Alice stayed the same. She hated her.

*

    The mirror on the Laund-Ro-Mat wall reads, "You are free,” the words etched beneath the reflections of fluorescent lights and slot machines of soap. You. Are. Free. Dark eyes stare out below the words, pupils dilated, nostrils pulsing, pores opening up for the light, yawning and letting it in. Her own glassy eyes remind Alice of the floating pus-colored embryos she saw as a little girl in a natural history museum: Tiny monster skeletons, Siamese twins joined at the pelvis or the top of the head, twins with twins coming out of their stomachs, two heads into one, two bodies, no soul. Elmer's Glue-colored faces floating in Chicken and Stars soup, real eyelids, nose and lips. Fingers, wrinkly elbows and tiny ears. Everything bland, monochromatic and soft. Embryonic skulls the size of a thumbnail, big eyes, toothless old man smiles. All of them glared out at her, sucking her in, asking for nothing in return but begging from her to love and accept them as they were, take them home in their little jars and sit them not on a shelf but in the sun and they will bloom, they'll bloom and grow and come to life and run around on her bathroom floor, careful not to step on them! and they'll love her because she's just the same as them, except they're in there and she's out here, dying standing still.
    The warbling of a static radio brings brown water-spotted ceiling tile back into focus and away from where her thoughts are already speeding away, ahead to a place far from the backseat, far from swishing water and whirring industrial-sized driers. Crackling staccato beats into voice, male garbled musings, and outside the window buildings begin to blur. Alice listens to the voices whispering to her in secret tongues she's never before had the chance to understand. Now they come together like puzzle pieces on a board, sucked together in the middle in fast-forward by some invisible centrifugal force. She closes her eyes and decodes it all, this new language, paint-by-numbers, the top sealed with lots of glue so it never breaks apart. Girl you couldn't get much high-yer. Something's falling down, settling over her like snow.
    A boy with clear eyes sits by the window and sighs. He hums along with the radio. He looks up at Alice and checks his nails before finally approaching. Alice coughs and wipes at her nose with the back of her hand, sniffs, glances around, avoids noticing the boy with clear eyes standing in front of her. She stares at the front of his jeans: stiff and white, most likely starched. They don't match the rest of him. Everything else seems filthy except for his eyes, which, when Alice looks into them, seem clean and dumb.
    "You Japanese?" he says. His breath smells like gin. He rubs his chin and looks at her through his hair, head ducked.
    Alice watches him and the phrase Shit For Brains comes to mind. "Sure," she says softly.

*

    In this light Jamie's face looks blue, electric blue and glowing. He hovers above her like an indigo-faced angel with shaggy blonde hair, biting his lip, clenching his jaw and closing his eyes. Once in a while the blue face swoops down and kisses her, alcohol-soaked breath looming dangerously close. Alice turns her face and lets him put his tongue in her ear and loud licking sounds almost drown out the white noise inside her veins. When Jamie's eyes are closed and his chin lifted, hands pushing her shoulders back into the bed with his elbows straight, a safe distance away, Alice thinks he looks almost cute. She can almost forget he's inside when he's so far away.
    "I'll make you come," Jamie says. "I can make you come."
    Jamie works at Manferd's, the pig slaughtering plant not too far outside of town. He dons thigh-high rubber boots every day after school. He seems bathed in the smell of blood and death. No matter how much soap or Aqua Velva he uses, when he gets excited or sweaty it just sort of pours out of him. Alice thinks maybe it is the way all boys smell. Jamie says, "Say fuck me.”
    In her mind Alice walks downstairs as slow as she can, counting each step and watching all the tiny rainbow squares wink at her from the walls. The highest window in the staircase is at least twenty feet high. This is her Rainbow Hall and Alice is the only one who ever sits in it, sometimes for hours, perched on top of the deep-scratched banister or on the balcony peering between the wooden slats at the tiny jewels almost directly across from her at this super-height. She always disappears, she thinks, when she's in this hall. She vanishes into all the hazy colors and golden light and dust. Then her feet remind her she's still here, she's still Alice, girl on the ground, and the brown carpet scratches her arches and toes. But now she shuffles across the landing and takes a flying leap down the steps. She forgets to bend her knees when she lands and sharp pains pierce her ankles and tingle up her shins. Alice never knew bones could be so easy to break. She never knew how easy it was to snap them like sticks of chalk, to grind them into zinc-y powder. Maybe it's just because these bones are so fucking old.
    "Say hurt me," Jamie says.
    In her mind Alice runs to the vacant lot in the middle of the block, the one with the railroad tracks running through the middle of the deep grass, the one with the mulberry tree and dandelions. But the back of her neck stings and kind of aches from where Jamie (who?) grabbed it. In her mind he, somebody, was push-running her down a hill and she thought for sure she was going to fall and then the big fat somebody would fall on top of her and crush her, maybe even crush her to death. She wondered if he knew this was going to happen, if that was his plan, but she guessed not because he didn't slow down, not even when her legs lifted off the ground and he was just sort of carrying her by the back of her neck like a mother cat but not as nice. He didn't fall and he didn't crush her but he did throw her down and she skidded on her knees and palms in the gravel. Still, it wasn't as bad as being crushed.
    This lot, her favorite flower-filled lot, has an old well mostly covered with long grass and filled with dirt but Alice thinks she can see bones when she lays on her stomach and looks inside. It's her old dog, Rabbit, buried here because nobody could stand the smell of it, the pink bows tied behind its ears. Looking into the well now, if she squints just the right way, Alice thinks she can still see Rabbit lying in the bottom with all the weeds and rocks. It reminds her of the time she peeped through the keyhole to her mother's closet, the way that her mother's eye was exactly in the hole peeking back at her from inside. Alice knew then that she'd never be able to catch her unaware. She'd always be there looking back. It's the same way now, Alice thinks, lying in the weeds and eating mulberries by the well, she knows Rabbit's down there and if she looks long and hard enough, she just might catch a glimpse. The dark tunnel yawns before her, lips parted like twin glass beads, and Alice comes.

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